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French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe with Natacha Bouchart, mayor of Calais, is on site in the north of France on Friday 18 January. Denis Charlet / AFP

Edouard Philippe is in Calais this Friday, January 18, 2019, in a city where anxiety grows as the exit of the European Union approaches, especially if it is a Brexit without agreement between London and Brussels. Prime Minister's visit to reassure business leaders.

Four billion euros a year is what the Brexit could cost France. The head of government came to Calais to reassure bosses anxious about the restoration of a border.

The first step of Edouard Philippe: Eurotunnel, crossing point between the continent and the British island. 1.7 million trucks cross the Channel each year on the track of this company.

CEO Jacques Gounon has launched the construction of a new site to control cargo. " We are planning a parking storage area for heavy goods vehicles that would have formalities to carry out or that would be subject to physical checks by the customs services . "

More checks means more time spent, money lost, but also the risk of incursion of migrants, worries Jacques Gounon: " The least possibility for migrants to be able to cross immediately creates a significant diplomatic problem . "

Today, the future control center is only at the construction site, and time is running out. Eurotunnel has only 70 days before a Brexit that seems inevitable: " It's not easy, it's tense, it's very tense, but we are motivated, " says the CEO.

→ To read again: The French State reveals its plan in case of Brexit without agreement

■ Edouard Philippe at the microphone of our special correspondent, Julien Chavanne:

" On the 30th of March, if the hard Brexit were to intervene, we will be ready. We will be ready, the work will have been done, the recruitments will have been made, the procedures will have been implemented - or adapted where they already exist - to ensure that this hard Brexit can happen in the best conditions for our fellow citizens. .

Our objective, I remind you, is to guarantee the legal security of situations, and the smooth flow of trade, be it exchanges of people or exchanges of goods, between our two economies, which are obviously very intertwined. But it is clear that choosing to leave the European Union, choosing to disembark savings, that's a cost.

It is a delicate exercise, it is a difficult exercise, it reminds us in a certain way of the interest that there can be in a single market with our European partners; the interest in terms of simplicity, in terms of growth, in terms of the homogeneity of standards that apply on one side or the other of the border. "